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The Bones of Avalon

Page 25

by Phil Rickman


  ‘There are those who occasionally travel here from… distant places I’ve never heard of. Further than France or Spain or the low countries, anyway. Further even than the Arimathean travelled, I suppose.’

  ‘The East?’

  ‘Some.’

  ‘You mean holy men? Magi?’

  ‘On – what is it – camels? All in silk robes?’ She laughed. ‘Rags, more like, and on foot. Not wealthy, except in spirit. We feed them and we give them shelter, and they take our air. Visit our high places, drink from our wells. And share with us their… ways of being.’

  ‘Does Fyche—?’

  ‘Good God, no. Although some of them came to the abbey, in the old days. To meet with the abbot and senior monks.’

  ‘And your mother?’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  I moistened my dry lips. ‘What was she growing, Nel?’

  ‘Collecting, mainly. She collected from the fields and hedgerows more than she grew. In search of cures – smallpox, wool-sorters’ disease. Her ambition was quietly boundless.’

  ‘And the dust of vision?’

  The first splotter of slow rain came on the window glass.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘that.’

  ‘Maybe I’ve also been sent here to learn.’

  She made no reply.

  ‘If I’d been here in your mother’s day I suppose I might’ve gone pleading to her, like Joan Tyrre, for a little flask of…’

  Nel unlaced her cloak with a small pull and it slid from her shoulders. My hands shook.

  She bent to dip a hand into her cloth bag. When it emerged it was holding a small, stoppered earthenware pot.

  ‘This?’

  Now the storm was all around us.

  You think me mad to trust this woman with the sovereignty of my senses?

  Maybe you’re right. Maybe there was a madness in me that night, born of years of unsatisfied longing. All I can say is that, as soon as I’d heard of it, I knew that if it were still to be found in Glastonbury, this dust of vision, then I could not leave the town without having tested it upon myself.

  Never thinking for one minute, though, that Nel Borrow would carry it around in her bag.

  ‘It’s been found to help pregnant women,’ she said, ‘when the child won’t come. And for the relief of those who bleed too much afterwards.’

  ‘Is this the common use?’

  ‘And also for the severe head-pains with bright lights and no cause.’

  ‘Your mother discovered it?’

  ‘Of course not. It’s been around, in one form or another, since the most ancient of days. I’m surprised you haven’t come across it in your studies.’

  ‘In truth,’ I said, ‘I think I have.’

  It all came back to me now, watching Nel Borrow laying out an array of items from her bag on the candlelit board. I hadn’t read of it, merely been told, and what was not put down in a book was always suspect to me, but what else could it be?

  Ignis sacer.

  A small but severe plague of it had been spoken of when I was in France last year. Many people had died, but from the disease itself rather than its effects on their minds, the survivors speaking of visions both dreadful and exultant.

  The holy fire.

  The disease was a burning from within: terrible agonies, convulsions, loss of all control over movement. A dance, Monger had called it, and this would certainly have described what happened in France, where the talk had been of the wrath of God visited upon a faithless community. I hadn’t read of it, so I’d dismissed it as exaggeration to frighten people into some religious conformity.

  Nel had spread out a clean white cloth over the board. Brought out a small knife and a wooden spoon. There was also a flask of water which reddened when shaken, leading me to suppose it from the Blood Well.

  Then a crystal goblet, a scrap of paper. An apple and a small wooden cup.

  She unstoppered the earthenware pot.

  I said, ‘Tell me what this is.’

  ‘The powder? ’Tis ground from a fungus. It grows on grain. In this case, barley. Hangs from it like a black ear. My mother would pound it in a pestle with… other herbs.’

  ‘She showed you how to make it?’

  ‘No. Never. It took me over a year to get it right – driven, at the time, by the need to relieve the suffering of our neighbour, Alice – aching head. Keeping the whole street awake, with moans all through the night. Some strange cries, indeed, the night Alice took—’ She looked up at me. ‘Are you sure about this?’

  I nodded decisively. There’d be no chance of trying it when Dudley was up and about again.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said. ‘It will probably have no effect.’

  Telling her of the night I’d brewed some powder of the mushrooms gathered in our orchard by Jack Simm. The little mushrooms that come in the autumn.

  ‘This was in London?’

  ‘In my library in Mortlake. Thinking that if I were surrounded by all the wisdom of the ancients, its effects might be… why are you smiling?’

  ‘No reason, Dr John. No reason at all.’

  I was able to smile, too. But had not Monger, speaking of the dust of vision, told me: I’ve heard it said that the place where the potion was ingested might condition the response?

  ‘Where’s it best to drink this?’ I asked her, for I was anxious now for it to be done before I could change my mind. ‘Should I take it outside?’

  ‘In the storm? I think not. I heard of a man once for whom the falling rain turned to a hail of arrows.’ She looked at me. ‘You’ll have no control.’

  ‘Is that not the point of it?’

  ‘It’s just that you strike me as a man for whom a degree of self-control—’

  ‘May be the cause,’ I said, almost breathless, ‘of all my deficiences. As you’ve implied.’

  Yet had not the man of science in me already dwelt on the possibilities for further research if I could obtain some of the potion to take back to London? Was I not already wondering how its effects might be conditioned by the movement of seasons or the positioning of stars at the time it was ingested?

  Nel Borrow was bent over the board, spooning something from the earthenware pot onto the paper.

  ‘The quantity must be so small as to be almost invisible to the untutored eye, else the consequences… God only knows how much that boy in Somerton swallowed.’ She looked up. ‘Have you ever heard the affliction called by the name St Anthony’s Fire?’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘Though I don’t know why. Did St Anthony have visions?’

  ‘All saints seem to have had visions.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but are visions that come as a result of taking a potion… are they still what you would call sacred?’

  ‘I know not,’ I said. ‘And there may lie more heresy.’

  There was a silence, even the rain holding back. Or so it seemed from this golden sanctum.

  ‘Would it not be possible’ – Nel Borrow held the flask before the candles, and the liquid turned to amber – ‘that the senses, through the action of the herbs, might be awakened to the spiritual?’

  The liquid was lit red-gold. Her eyes were amber green. The admonishing rain was coming hard now at the window as she lifted the paper betwixt her fingers and funnelled powder into the little wooden cup. Adding a little water and pouring more into the crystal goblet.

  Could the pathway to divinity be glimpsed through the bottom of a goblet? Or the road to hellfire…

  And what, oh my God, was to be be glimpsed behind those lustrous green eyes?

  What followed had a certain sense of the Mass, in which I still strongly, if quietly, believe, for it surely is an ancient, alchemical formula for the highest transformation.

  She handed me the goblet.

  ‘This is from the Blood Well. And this… is for you to hold.’

  A stone. A pale brown pebble, as if from a riverbed, near the size of a hen’s egg. It felt cool in my hand.
/>   ‘What is it?’

  ‘I found it inside the tower on the tor.’ With the knife, she was cutting the apple in half. ‘It will ground you.’

  I nodded, kept the stone in my hand as I raised the goblet to my lips.

  She said, ‘Wait…’

  When I put the vessel down, some of the fluid was spilled across the boardtop.

  ‘You’re afraid,’ she said. ‘Your hand’s trembling.’

  ‘It’s the cold.’

  ‘’Tis not good to do this when you’re afraid.’ She took my hand; I shuddered at the warmth and energy in her fingers. ‘John… I think… I feel that you don’t need to do this. You, of all people, must know that there are other ways. Think about it.’

  ‘Am I not the man who thinks too much?’

  She said, ‘What have you not told me?’

  I wanted so much to turn over my hand to grip hers, but her face was so solemn. Instead, I drew a hard, slow breath, bad memories hauled in on a long, frayed rope.

  ‘I have dreams,’ I whispered. ‘Recurring dreams.’

  Didn’t go on. Didn’t tell her about the dreams of fire, my arms and legs as blackened twigs. I felt apart from myself now, but maybe not in the way she’d spoken of. Recalling how, watching the parade of townsfolk before the Baptist’s Church the other day, I’d imagined them in a play, their bodies feigning ordinary life, while their real lives were happening on some other level. Now I felt I was to become part of that play. Was given the means to enter that other reality.

  ‘Listen…’ She leaned forward. ‘There are other ways. We’ll work together on the other ways.’

  She reached out for the goblet, but I snatched it up and turned away and drank down the liquid, all of it.

  The thunder was dying, now, but maybe the storm had only just begun.

  XXX

  Like to the Sun

  I WENT TO sit on the edge of the bed, and we talked. Or she did. I only sat and listened to the soft, sad music of her voice as she spoke of her father and how, after her mother’s execution, he’d thrown himself into his work, riding out each night to care for the sick, spending no more waking minutes than he needed in the bed where his wife would lie no more.

  The tragedy of it was so extreme and there was such physical pain in my heart that I began to weep into my hands.

  ‘Damn,’ Nel Borrow murmured. ‘What do you do to lose the cares of the day, Dr John?’

  ‘Cares?’ Wiped my eyes on my sleeve, dragging out a smile. ‘There are no cares if I’m working. Did your mother have cares when she was tending her garden?’

  ‘She had –’ a wistful smile – ‘two hundred kinds of herbs. They took a lot of care. If life were only work and we were allowed to do it unmolested…’

  ‘Then there’d be no sorrow, for some of us.’

  And no joy either, my mother would snap back, she who understood not the heady pleasures of scholarship.

  ‘Felt so safe in her garden,’ Nel said. ‘Open to the land all the way to the sea, and the tor rising on the other side and the soaring golden pinnacles of the abbey. It was a paradise. Avalon.’

  I thought of my own garden in the sky, its constellations laid out like arrangements of flowers in a fine elusive symmetry that awoke in me a yearning deeper than the night.

  ‘You still maintain her garden?’

  ‘Well… best I can. Fewer than half as many herbs now. When the abbey was alive, she’d have help. Even the abbot… the abbot came and went and they’d go for long walks through the fields and along the marshland, by the river, gathering plants…’

  As she talked, I could see the shining river as in summer, the strips of water shimmering on the edges of the fields, blue-white mist rising like the ghost of the long-departed sea.

  ‘.…and also Master Leland, for a while.’

  I looked up.

  ‘John Leland? John Leland the antiquarian?’

  I began pinching my lower thigh to confirm that I was not yet taken into some other sphere.

  ‘And maker of charts. Recorder of topography.’

  ‘John Leland worked with your mother and the abbot?’

  ‘Not with the abbot. I think the abbot was wary of him. He came sometimes and walked with my mother. Poor Master Leland.’

  She sighed, and the sigh became a tapestry of shadows drawn around her. Her body was outlined with quiet light against the umber shades of the woods in the tapestry, and I had to turn my eyes away. Knowing nothing of Leland’s interest in herbs. Only old manuscripts and the arrangement of the land.

  ‘So this was not on Leland’s first visit to the town.’

  ‘He came back.’

  ‘I know. After the Dissolution.’

  Dissolution. The word bubbling out of me, a pelucid stream over pebbles. I bent and let it ripple over my fingers.

  ‘I’ve a memory of Master Leland coming to our house. Can still see his beardless face, all bony like a Roman statue. I remember him shouting, “You don’t understand, I’m my own man now.” He kept saying that.’

  ‘What did he mean? Was he in his right mind? Because—’

  ‘How would I know? I was young.’

  Still young.

  I gazed into the core of the candlefire, where small, tight flames were coalescing into a single body of light like to a full and golden moon, and I felt my heart swelling in my breast like a blood-red poppy close to exploding from its bud.

  But stop. Dear God. Think.

  I looked up, which seemed to take a very long time.

  ‘You know that, in the end, John Leland went mad?’ Feeling my body begin to list I put out a hand to the nearest bedpost. ‘It was said that his mind was overloaded with the magnitude of his obsession… his task of chronicling the topography of the whole country?’

  ‘All I know is my father mistrusted him. Said his first visit was to collect treasure, and his second was to collect… the place itself.’

  The stone moved in my hand.

  ‘My father says that on that last visit he went in search of former monks from the abbey. He went looking for them.’

  ‘Leland?’

  I opened my hand and the stone was still.

  ‘But they’d have nothing to do with him. Blaming him, in part, for the killing of Abbot Whiting.’

  ‘What did he want from the monks?’

  This question seemed at the crux of it. What did the monks know? I reached out for an answer, the stock of the apple tree hard against my shoulder.

  ‘I know not. Nor what he wanted from my mother. All the treasure was long gone.’

  I looked for her expression, but her face was in complete darkness, for she’d moved deeper into the circle of trees and bushes, away from the probing moon.

  The stone in my hand was squirming and pulsing like a toad.

  Long gone.

  I crooked an arm around the tree at my side and saw the cold majesty of the tor rising before me out of the thick, brown mist with the sky aswirl around its tower. And now it was no longer night but not full day either, a darkness overhead, a dark beating, and I looked up to see the air all full of cawking crows, and a man labouring towards me down the hill, swaying slightly, side to side.

  ‘When did Leland…?’

  The words beaten away into the air by the wings of the crows all around me, and I turned away and covered my head with my arms. But the crows swooped and pecked at my hands, ripping the flesh from the backs of them and sought my eyes, and I was crying out and fell on my face on the damp earth and lay there for a long time.

  Hours passing, me smeared upon the richness of the soil, born of dead matter, new life out of decay. Thinking on this for many long hours, all the fecund beauty of it, until I felt the silence growing around me, a black pressing that, with time, I could not ignore and, turning, with great apprehension, upon my back, I saw, above me, Martin Lythgoe.

  Gazing down upon me, a look of bafflement on his face and his hands linked at his abdomen to receive the shining intesti
nes slithering out of him in a soup of blood.

  Tried to turn away and couldn’t. Couldn’t move.

  Knowing now, for sure, that it was me. That I’d killed him. Sending him away to his death. Murdering him just as sure as Cate Borrow had killed the boy in Somerton… twin souls, the witch and the conjuror. In seeking knowledge, we court the night.

  Guilt.

  And did, by means of sorcery, attempt to kill or grievously harm Her Majesty…

  Struggling to breathe.

  ‘Still,’ she said. ‘Be still, John.’

  Take him.

  Taking my hands as I’m bound from behind. My back to the post and the rusted iron hoop around my chest and the air’s tainted now with the grey smoke of foreboding, and now comes the smell of old dry straw and the excited crackle of bone-dry twigs at first kindling.

  Heresy.

  A sudden rush of acrid gases to the throat, and I can’t breathe, nor hardly cough, for there’s only smoke, all about me now, and I try to cry out, but the air is full of choking gas and the crickle-crackle of the twigs and the chitter-chatter of the gathering crowd.

  Fine line, Dr John.

  A rush and a fizz as the straw catches light. A little sizzling.

  The s-word, John, the s-word.

  Here’s Bishop Bonner in monk’s habit with that plump and full-toothed grin. Observing, with a giggle, the ignition of clothing, points of savage heat and piercing agony, now, in the skin, and a slow funnelling of smoke from my sleeves.

  Tell me, then, Doctor, how can the soul acquire divinity?

  His laughter’s a peal of discordant bells, and there’s a smell on the air of roasting pork, rich and succulent.

  By prayer…

  Whispered through the hiss of spitting fat.

  …and suffering.

  Bonner’s beam outshines the fire as I look down at my hands, and one hand’s gone charcoal black, the skin all shrivelled and the fingers crisped and flaking away.

  And I’m screaming hard against the roaring in my ears, the molten wax, but there’s no release for the scream, for my cheeks are full of gas, and there’s a core of heat behind the eyes, a boiling in the sockets and then, of a sudden, the sparks have found my hair, making there a small forest fire, and then there’s a great whooooop…

 

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